In the process of getting my wireless USB dongle (trendnet tew-424ub) to work, and for a while there it was going quite well. Followed the instructions in the Ubuntu wiki. Got it to work with WEP. Then went to reboot to make sure it would start it (ndiswrapper) up at boot time.

Lo and behold, wlan0 was no longer in the network panel at all, and when i tried to modprobe ndiswrapper, it gave be a fatal error:

I don't at all understand how I could have done just this same command before I rebooted and it worked, but now it fails.

Sincerest gratification to anyone who helps me with this. It's aggravating to not get it to work, but it's worse when you had it working and now it doesn't.

You have to use "sudo" or issue the command as root. Donot justAlso, list "ndiswrapper" in /etc/modules and it will be automatically loaded at boot up.

Did both of those & still got the problem--here's what happened:

When I did sudo modprobe ndiswrapper, first of all, I got the same Fatal error, which is what made me so confused. Didn't understand how sudo didn't have the privileges to set up the wireless network (then who would?).

Also, I did add ndiswrapper to /etc/modules, and got an even worse result. After the problem with modprobe, I rebooted only to have the booting process hand on "Loading modules." It wasn't able to start up, and I ended up having to reinstall Ubuntu. Still having same problems, can't figure them out. Pretty weird huh?

Thanks for your advice though. It seems like this would work on any normal computer. Why not mine??

what is the output of "ndiswrapper -l"?

As of now, after having reinstalled Ubuntu twice and reinstalled the driver twice, the ndiswrapper -l command gives:

Installed drivers:
sis163u driver installed, hardware present

Just to give you an idea, I didn't even run the command. I've done this so many times I can type it from memory. That is definitely what it says though, nom istake. The only problem arises with modprobe ndiswrapper.

Thanks!

That's strange.
What kernel are you running.
uname -a

Sorry, I hit the reply to early. I have a couple of other suggestions you may want to try.
Make sure you have the kernel-source is installed and there is a link to the kernel source from the modules directory.
ie. ln -s /usr/src/linux-<kernel-version> /lib/modules/VERSION/build
where version is your kernel version.

Also how did you install ndiswrapper? Did you just use apt-get or did you compile it yourself from source? I remember reading somewhere that if you have multiple versions of ndiswrapper it could act funny, so just make sure you did one or the other.